If you care a lot about your church’s digital presence, you’ve probably spent a lot of time working on your website’s homepage. You’ve thought through the menu, the main images and the how your logo is displayed. You know that your website is the first thing that most of your visitors will see (yes, even before they see your building).

Your Twitter profile shouldn’t be treated any differently. Your Twitter profile is a great way to display your branding and provide additional call to actions for your visitors. Sadly, a lot churches neglect their Twitter profile and never take the time to give it the proper attention it deserves. What a lot of churches don’t realize is that just like their website’s homepage, the Twitter profile page is extension of their digital brand.
Don’t lose out on this opportunity to maintain and enhance your digital presence. There are some simple things that you can do make sure your church is getting the most out of its Twitter profiles. Don’t know where to start? Well, here are seven ways you can improve your church’s Twitter profile right now:

7 Ways to Improve Your Church’s Twitter Profile Right Now

Create Your Profile Photo – A great Twitter profile starts with having the right profile photo. This can be your church’s logo or something iconic that represents your church. Whatever you choose make sure that it represents who you are in a way that your audience will recognize.

When creating your profile photo you want to make sure that it’s 500 x 500 pixels and a resolution of 72 ppi (pixels per inch). Also make sure your photo looks good cropped as a square. Follow these directions and your profile photo will look good on all devices.

Create Your Header Photo – Your cover photo is what sits at the top of your Twitter profile behind your profile photo. This is a great opportunity to display your church building, worship center or sermon series graphics. Just keep in mind that your Twitter profile photo will sit on top of the header photo. See the mobile phone example below:

Your Twitter header photo needs to be 1252 x 626 and 72 ppi (pixels per inch). Unlike your profile photo, this one will be rectangle, so keep that in mind when creating the image. Of course you also need to check your image on a mobile device since it will be seen there as well.

Fill Out Your Info – It’s tempting when creating your church’s Twitter profile to put just your church’s name and location in the description field. However, you’re missing out on a opportunity to provide the visitor with a clear understanding about your church. This could be your church’s missions statement or a clear call to action for the visitor. No matter what you put in the description area make sure that it’s compelling to the visitor.

Link to Your Website – On your profile page Twitter gives you an opportunity to link to your church’s website. However think beyond just a link to your website and create something unique for your visitors. Try linking to a “new here” page or another page that you’ve designed for people visiting you from Twitter.

Use a Custom URL – When your tweeting out links from your Twitter account you could be missing out on a chance for additional branding. You see whenever you use a service like Buffer to schedule out our church’s tweets the service shortens your tweets using a service like Bit.ly. So instead of just accepting the shortened URL from Bit.ly, create your own custom URL.

See how the “http://bbapt.us&#8221; is different from the normal Bit.ly shortener? That’s our church’s (Brentwood Baptist, hence the “bbapt”) custom URL shortener.

Clean Up Your Following List – You’re supposed to follow everyone who follows you on Twitter. Right? Well, there are differing opinions on this (I’m not a big fan of this). However, if your church chooses to follow back everyone who follows them, make sure your following people that you would want your church to be associated with. I suggest about every six months you do some spring cleaning with your Twitter following list and remove anything that might reflect badly on your church.

Post Proper Image Sizes – I’ve made plenty of mistakes on social media and posting the wrong image size on Twitter is one of them. Keep in mind that when you’re posting an image on Twitter that it won’t appear exactly the way you took the photo. For example, Twitter mobile crops photos so you can preview them as you scroll through the timeline. In order to make your photos work with this cropping make sure you photos are 1024 x 512 (which is essentially a rectangle). An easy way to think of this is to post photos that are taken in landcaspe and not portrait mode.

Hopefully this list has you thinking about how you can improve your church’s Twitter profile. If you have anything that you think I missed or you would like to add, just comment below!